--- On Thu, 5/23/13, dave <dengv...@charter.net> wrote: > Has anyone done a gantry that drives with a central motor > and mechanical > linkage to both sides. I'm thinking more like a solid T not > gearing to > both sides. Just to put your mind at ease I've not had my > coffee yet.
Yes, there's some videos on youtube of various systems. One version uses a stationary chain or belt, looped around a drive sprocket and a couple of idlers. A shaft runs across the gantry to an identical set of sprockets and chain. The gantry cannot get out of square. A similar approach can be used with a rack and pinion drive. The connecting shaft wouldn't have to be connected to the drive system, just the gantry. If it's only going to be used on sheet material all it would need is a shaft with a gear on each end to engage the rack and sufficient bearings to support the shaft across the table. If the shaft can't be down low, use two meshed gears at each end or pair a sprocket with the gear and run chains up to sprockets on the shaft ends, high as need be to clear what the gantry moves over. What gets me is why on a 5x10 foot table the manufacturer would put the gantry across the long way. Across the short way it could do exactly the same work. There's a way to connect the sides with a shaft without completely redesigning the gantry. It just takes looking at with a bodger's eye. ;-) A benefit to that would be freeing up a controller axis by replacing the motor on each side with one, more powerful motor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
